Comparing Anthos to other Google Cloud services. For anyone who has any existing experience with other Google Cloud Platform services, Anthos will already feel somewhat familiar to you. Many tools you may have already been using on GCP, like Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Build, and Operations Suite all function the same way within Anthos, and the user interface to manage Anthos looks quite like the Google Cloud Console you're used to working with. While Anthos is built to be a multi-cloud solution that can run in other environments, users who are already familiar with Google Cloud Platform will naturally find it easiest to adopt Anthos because much of that experience translates over directly.

Deploying Anthos on Google Cloud Platform is also made incredibly easy to do. Google offers a wide array of cloud services that exist outside of Anthos that we might want to leverage with our Anthos deployment, like perhaps a CloudSQL database, some CDN file storage, or maybe we have some special purpose Google Compute Engine virtual machine instance, for example. We're able to provision any other Google Cloud Platform resources we need with Anthos using the help of Config Connector. Config Connector allows us to write Kubernetes style configuration files for GCP resources, which we can then deploy and manage using Anthos GKE. This is all done securely with the help of Google Identity and Access Management, offering basically a seamless integration between Anthos and the rest of Google Cloud Platform.

While users already operating on Google Cloud Platform may have the easiest time moving to Anthos, they also may have the least reason to immediately do so. Remember that moving to Anthos is more about modernization than migration, and GCP and Anthos are made of many of the same technologies. If your infrastructure consists of mainly Google Compute Engine VMs, there would most certainly be benefits to modernizing to containers with GKE or Anthos. If you are already managing containers using Google Kubernetes Engine, or you already employ a microservices architecture using Google Cloud Functions or Google Cloud Run, there may be no pressing need for you to move to Anthos at all. You could, however, very easily move your existing services to Anthos with only minimal code changes, if perhaps you decided you needed to migrate or expand to additional service providers.

We should now have a better understanding that Anthos essentially packages a number of Google Cloud Platform services together, so we can run them on our own servers or on other providers. In the next lecture, we'll take a closer look at some of those other cloud service providers, discuss how we can run Anthos on them, and compare Anthos to their own cloud products.